In April of 1970 the United States decided to invade Cambodia, thus expanding the Vietnam War. I was nearing the end of my freshman year in college. Campuses around the country rose up in angry indignation. Protests were planned, strikes were proposed, marches were organized. I attended a campus wide meeting where various strategies of resistance were discussed. I was unsure about how I felt about the turn of events: until that point I had been moderately supportive of the government’s objective: to stem the spread of Communism. At the same time I wanted to support my fellow students, but was morally uncomfortable with the idea of going on strike, and overtly challenging the reigning power structure.
As we mulled about at the close of the meeting, I raised my ambivalence with several classmates. “The Nixon administration is saying things that are very different from what we just heard”, I remarked. “Maybe the government isn’t telling the truth”, came the response.
I had never thought of that. Could it be possible the government was, if not lying, then channeling the narrative in a certain way that altered, if not denied the truth? I had always trusted the prevailing perspective as issued from places of power. My classmate’s observation served as the catalyst for a conversion experience for me. It was the beginning of a significant paradigm shift.
Paradigm is a Greek word meaning pattern. To that point in my life my paradigm had been to follow the leaders’ lead. The conversation at the end of the organizing meeting upended all that. I began to cultivate a new pattern, a desire which was reinforced several days later when four students were shot and killed at a protest at Kent State by undertrained and overly aggressive Ohio National Guard troops.
My paradigm shift wasn’t always easy or smooth. My new-found opposition to the Vietnam War precipitated many other perspective changes, and the development of new patterns. While most of my peers were supportive of this transformation, my parents were not. The Nixon Administration — and what he called his “silent majority”, consistently denigrated protesters. Vice President Spiro Agnew referred to opponents of the war as “nattering nabobs of negativism”.
There have been many paradigm shifts in our culture since the spring of 1970. Women began to ascend to positions of authority in the work force. The Episcopal Church, which is my religious tradition, allowed women to become priests (1976) and later to be elected as bishops (1988). In the broader culture, any evidence of homosexual behavior, which for generations was categorized as a crime, was permitted to step out of the closet into the mainstream; and eventually the paradigm of marriage was expanded to include gay and lesbian couples who wished to memorialize their love in a lifelong union. The systemic patterns of racial discrimination have been exposed — in the courts, in schools, on the streets and in the workplace, opening up, in some places, greater acceptance of one another. Earth day became an unofficial holiday in 1970, a designation which promoted a paradigm shift from dominating (and despoiling) the planet to honoring its resources and engaging in kind of respectful collaboration. The list goes on.
All of these rather recent shifts in paradigms were met with some form of resistance, often with moral and in some cases legal recrimination. For nearly ten years that resistance to paradigm shifts has been gathered up into a slogan: Make America Great Again. Under that banner the second Trump Administration has taken fierce and ruthless aim at many of these paradigm shifts and tried to shut them down or destroy them, all with the purpose of, yes, demonstrating unbridled power, but at another level, trying to bring the culture back to a time when patterns were locked in, and unchallenged. When people automatically trusted whatever the leader was saying and doing, as I did as a naive 18 year old college freshman. Take the paradigm shifts away. Restore us to the halcyon days, a claim that has proven to be misguided nostalgia not to mention an historical fiction.
It won’t work. And as more and more people are seeing, the clamping down on change is meeting resistance because it is not working. That said, the energy and cruelty of MAGA is doing unspeakable damage. Paradigm shifts are inevitable, provided we are given the freedom to think and speak freely. The MAGA movement seeks to undermine that freedom, if not take it away. We are a species that continues to learn. Much of that learning leads to greater liberty for more and more people. These learnings and corresponding paradigm shifts need to be nurtured and honored. It is true that some acceptance of behavior patterns end up feeding unhealthy appetites (the ubiquity of pornography and sports betting comes to mind), and I think they could be better managed; they are impossible to shut down.
In 1932, during the devastation of the Great Depression, theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote the Serenity Prayer, the first part of which is well known to most people; and is offered at the close of most 12-step meetings: “God, give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” Until recently I didn’t know that the prayer continues: “taking, as He (Jesus) did, this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it.”
Taking this broken, sinful world as it is. In all its beauty and ugliness, brutality and compassion. As it is. That requires keeping our minds and hearts aware of the full spectrum of how we treat one another, which takes some hard internal work. “Not as I would have it.” Not to shut down what I don’t want to see or hear or learn. Not to lock into a paradigm that locks everything into a kind of stasis that may protect some but does enormous harm to others.
A paradigm of openness and hope.


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